How the Iraq decision was made

The Italian dinner in Georgetown with Michelle Obama would have to wait.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, jumped into President Barack Obama’s limousine at the close of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit on Wednesday night. As the motorcade snaked its way through Washington, Dempsey briefed Obama on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Rather than head out immediately for a rare night on the town, the president ended up in the Oval Office, weighing a military mission.

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Over the next 24 hours, Obama had opened the next phase in his personal tug of war with Iraq, ordering airstrikes in a country he thought he had escaped.

Obama made the decision after three major meetings with his national security advisers from Wednesday night through Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official said Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The president received detailed assessments of the threat that Islamist militants posed to American interests and the consequences of not aiding the Yazidis, a religious and ethnic minority, who were trapped on a mountain surrounded by the extremists. He agreed on Wednesday night during his Oval Office meeting with Dempsey, national security adviser Susan Rice, chief of staff Denis McDonough and others that there would at least need to be a humanitarian response.

Only then did Obama head to dinner with the first lady and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett at Fiola Mare, a high-end restaurant on the Potomac River waterfront in Georgetown.

But Thursday morning, the urgency to act in Iraq became clear: Obama’s advisers warned that there would likely be a genocide.

“I had not heard the word ‘genocide’ used in the Situation Room before,” the official said. “That word has a lot of weight.”

The reports from the intelligence community and the State Department were vivid and compelling, the official said: People were dying of hunger and thirst, women risked being enslaved and the existence of a religious minority looked imperiled. It more than met the legal definition of genocide, aides told Obama.

“While we have faced many difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category,” the official said. “This was qualitatively different from even the awful things we have confronted in different parts of the region because of the targeted nature, the scale of it, the fact this is a whole people. That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention.”

After a 90-minute meeting Thursday morning, the president headed to Fort Belvoir to sign a veterans health bill, making no mention of the worsening conditions in northern Iraq or his private deliberations on what to do about it.

But as soon as he returned to the White House, he convened another meeting in the Situation Room. It was then that he decided to go beyond just a humanitarian response to authorize airstrikes.

The major concern was the seizure of the Mosul Dam. If it were ever breached, the result would be catastrophic, causing the flooding of Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Erbil, officials said.

“We were watching some metrics to have a sense of tipping points,” one official said. “And one of them was very much the dam.”

The discussion Thursday afternoon focused on the scope of the mission, with the president making clear that there would have to be strict parameters.

Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start, a position that boosted his national appeal when he ran for the Senate a decade ago, and he made ending the conflict a centerpiece of his 2008 presidential campaign. The last American troops left Iraq in 2011, an accomplishment that Obama touted throughout his reelection campaign as a promise delivered.

There would be no forces on the ground, and the mission would be defined narrowly: protecting American personnel and facilities, and addressing a humanitarian crisis, officials said.

“Part of deliberations yesterday were about refining the objective of the mission but also the limitations,” the official said. “He did not want to create a slippery slope. He wanted to identify clear objectives.”

When Obama stepped in front of the cameras Thursday night, the first wave of the U.S. operation had already begun — the dropping of food and water into the areas where the Yazidis were trapped.

At the time, however, airstrikes were still only a threat.

“There is no decision that I take more seriously than the use of military force,” Obama said Thursday night in the State Dining Room. “Over the last several years, we have brought the vast majority of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’ve been careful to resist calls to turn time and again to our military, because America has other tools in our arsenal than our military. We can also lead with the power of our diplomacy, our economy and our ideals.

“But when the lives of American citizens are at risk, we will take action,” he said. “That’s my responsibility as commander in chief. And when many thousands of innocent civilians are faced with the danger of being wiped out, and we have the capacity to do something about it, we will take action. That is our responsibility as Americans. That’s a hallmark of American leadership. That’s who we are.”